Advertisement

Advertisement

New Scientist Live

Blood minerals are electronics industry’s dirty secret

A crackdown in the US is forcing technology firms to come clean about the source of the minerals used in their smartphones and electronics

By Paul Marks

Smartphone supplies

(Image: Jiro Ose/Redux/Eyevine)

SMARTPHONE makers would prefer not to talk about it. The tiny components that make your phone work could contain materials that are financing a number of bloody conflicts in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). The vast natural wealth of the country has helped fund decades of fighting between armed groups that has forced more than 2.75 million people from their homes, in addition to ongoing killings, torture and abductions.

Last week the US Securities and Exchange Commission’s deadline passed for 1200 US-listed companies to report on whether any metal in their microchips comes from mines controlled by these militias. But while a few, like Intel, provided independently audited reports to the SEC, the majority filed reports saying their sources of tin, tungsten, tantalum and gold – collectively known as the 3TG metals – were “DRC conflict indeterminable”.

Most, including Vodafone, Ford and Google, blamed their subcontractors’ inability to assess whether the smelters or refiners who had sold them their 3TG metals had obtained their ore from conflict-free mines certified legal by the DRC government.

Advertisement

DRC has vast natural supplies of the minerals needed for semiconductors and circuit boards. Tantalum is an efficient capacitor and tungsten is an ideal on-chip connector for transistors. Tin is replacing lead in solder. Gold’s high conductivity, meanwhile, makes it ideal for connector terminals (see map).FIG-mg29734801.jpg

What makes policing it tough in DRC’s eastern Kivu region, where the majority of the mines are, is their informal nature. “They look like a scar on a hillside until you see there are people in shorts and flip-flops digging,” says Sophia Pickles of Global Witness, an NGO that tries to minimise violent conflict by revealing the economic networks behind it. “The tunnels are unsupported holes that go tens or hundreds of metres into the hillside.”

Companies have been reluctant to vet their supply chains because of cost. Some even use the argument that having to declare conflict minerals is a breach of their free speech.

The DRC government issues approved mines with controlled bags for ore which are then tagged with unique numbers. “There’s a chain of custody all the way out of the country until it gets to the smelter,” says Carolyn Duran, Intel’s conflict minerals programme manager.

The militias are changing their tactics as the controls bite, however. If DRC government auditors are seen at mines, some armed groups withdraw, says Global Witness, visiting perhaps only monthly by motorbike to extort cash from the miners. What’s more, official ore bags and tags are known to have been stolen and used illegally, says Bibi Bleekemolen at Fairphone, a company in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, that makes a conflict-mineral-free Android smartphone.

Nevertheless, the global tide is beginning to turn. Guidelines designed to minimise the use of conflict minerals, drawn up by the OECD in 2009, are to be adopted in the European Union, while China will soon introduce its own guidelines on the mines it invests in overseas. Companies should not wait for conflict mineral laws to hit statute books, says Pickles. “A responsible firm should just do it anyway.”